Category: Investment

Posts about investment in all the various forms that exit. Find out about cash, bonds and stocks. Find out why index funds are the best way to invest right and why Exchange Traded Funds are great investments.

While the comparison was fair, I did a “mistake”. Indeed, one of my readers pointed out that I only considered Fixed Pricing of Interactive Brokers. I forgot to consider Tiered Pricing. Tiered Pricing is a much more complicated pricing system that Interactive Brokers offers. I was thinking that it was only an account for big traders. But it turns out it is not the case. Indeed, it may be cheaper in some cases.

In fact, I did two “mistakes”. I also realized I did not take currency exchange into account. With these two mistakes, I thought it would be best to update my comparison in order to be fair. I do not want to present incomplete comparisons on this blog.

In this post, I am going to present this pricing system and compare once again the two brokers. Thanks a lot to cashfl0w for pointing out my mistake. Once again, I always welcome comments, especially when they help me learn new things.

If you read personal finance blogs, you will see that most of them are advocating investing in Vanguard Index Funds. On this blog, I also recommend using their index funds in most cases. I have more than 75% of my portfolio invested in Vanguard funds. And I plan to continue investing with of my money into their funds.

There are many different mutual funds companies. You probably have heard about Fidelity, BlackRock or T. Rowe. And there are others. But most people are talking about Vanguard. So what makes Vanguard so unique? Why is everybody recommending you to invest in their index funds?

I believe they are the best mutual fund company currently. There are many reasons that make them so great. In this post, we are covering the main points that make Vanguard unique.

I just finished reading another tiny book. I read “If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly”, by William J. Bernstein, on my Kindle. This is a quite recent book, from 2014. This is a simple book about how you can get rich slowly. It is specially tailored for millennials. The book is organized around five different hurdles in order to reach the goal of getting rich. I was lucky enough to find it for cheap on Kindle.

There is something very important in this book. The author insists on the fact that you can only get rich if you really want to go there. You need to do the job. There is no get-rich scheme where you have nothing to do. You need to save money and invest it. If you are not willing to save more money, nobody will do it for you!

Even if this book is titled for millennials, everybody can profit from it. In this post, we are going to see what this book has to offer you.

We have seen that there are many reasons to want to reach Financial Independence (FI). Once you reach FI, you can do what you want without having to worry about money. This is awesome! You only keep working if you want to. This is something most people would want to achieve. For me, my ultimate goal is to reach FI.

There are several ways to achieve Financial Independence. Indeed, there is not a single path to go from where are you now to the point where you are financially independent. Of course, there are some similarities between some of these ways. But they are different enough. Most of the time, you will need to follow several of these ways to reach Financial Independence earlier.

In this post, we are going to see the different paths you can take to become financially independent. There are surely other ways to reach Financial Independence. But these are the main ways and the ones I know. If you know of another sure way to become financially independent, I would be glad to hear about it.

Recently, my previous bank increased their fees. So I decided to change to a new bank account. After some research, I switched from PostFinance to Migros Bank. It may seem very easy to change your bank account. But there are many things you need to think about when you are doing it. Before I switched, I was thinking it was some work. But I was not thinking of everything I had to change. In this post, I am going to detail the things you have to think of for changing to your new bank account.

Another thing I tried to do during this change of bank account is to make it easier for the next time. I do not think it is a good thing to be tied to a single bank account. Next time, I want the process to be easier. So I am also going to share what I did to make it easier for next time. Hopefully, I will not have to change my bank account for a long time. But in the event of a change, I will be more prepared for it.

In Switzerland, you can do a voluntary contribution to your second pillar. The second pillar is the Swiss equivalent of a 401(K). These contributions come with some tax advantages since you can deduct that from your income. Therefore, you have a return equal to your marginal tax rate. However, the money is then blocked into the second pillar. And the returns on that blocked money have been very low in recent years. Finally, you can only withdraw the money from your second pillar if you retire, if you buy a house or if you start a company.

One question that I actually ask myself these days is whether I should contribute money to my second pillar or continue investing in stocks. These days we are able to invest enough money each month that I am wondering about this. I could contribute some money to my second pillar and continue to invest enough in stocks. But is it a good solution. In this post, I am going to try to answer this question.

October 2018 was a really nice and quiet month. It was not very eventful but we had several family events. And overall, we had a lot of fun and we did not spend a lot of money. Isn’t that the definition of a great month?

Compared to the expensive month of September 2018, we are much better off financially this month. We still had a few expenses that I would have liked to remove. But we are getting closer to a good budget month after month. In the future, there are some expenses that need to be reduced and some expenses that need to be eliminated. We managed to save more than half of our income this month!

While the month was very quiet for us, the stock market was far from being quiet. We arrived into correction territory for most of the major indexes. And our investment portfolio is down a lot this month. Since our portfolio is not yet huge, our net worth is still up since what we invested is more than what we spent. But this will not last. In the next correction, we will probably be down a lot more.

I recently compared the different third pillars available in Switzerland. I quickly came to the conclusion that VIAC provides the best third pillars in Switzerland. VIAC third pillars are cheap and have a very good global diversification. Moreover, you can have up to 97% of your portfolio invested in stocks. Before, my only problem with VIAC was that they are mobile-only. But I need to go over this small problem and be smarter about it! And since PostFinance increased their fees, I decided to walk away from them earlier than I planned.

Now that I have chosen my new third pillar, it is time to do the transfer. For this, I first have to open an account at VIAC. Then, I have to transfer my existing third pillar money from PostFinance to VIAC. In this post, I am going to describe the steps necessary to open a VIAC third pillar. In a second time, I am also going to describe how to transfer an existing third pillar to VIAC.

As you will see it is incredibly easy. If you think it is difficult to open a new third pillar and transfer your existing third pillar money on it, then I hope I will convince you that it is trivial! You should not delay changing a bad third pillar for a good one by the fear that it is difficult. Because it is not!

You may have read that I am using DEGIRO has my broker. In fact, I chose DEGIRO mainly because of its very low fees. I am very satisfied with my experience with DEGIRO. I have not had a big problem since I started using it, about a year ago.

Interactive Brokers is also a very popular broker. It has been there for much longer than DEGIRO who is a very young broker. And it also has very low fees. When I chose DEGIRO over Interactive Brokers, I did it because I thought it was cheaper.

In this post, we are going to compare once again DEGIRO and Interactive Brokers. I am going to do the comparison in details including the two different account types of DEGIRO. In the default account of DEGIRO (Basic), your shares can be lent to other investors. This is not something that is done by default with Interactive Brokers. Therefore, my previous comparison was not very fair! This time, I am going to try to make it better.

Have you ever wondered if you could learn money lessons from animated sitcoms? If you have, this post is for you! Today, we are going to learn money lessons from five South Park episodes!

This post is going to be very different from my usual posts. We are going to learn money lessons from animated sitcoms. I do not know you about you. But I really like American animated sitcoms. I watched several of them in their entirety. I cannot count the times I laughed uncontrollably at some of their episodes. Yes, they are incredibly dumb. It is the point. But that is what makes them incredibly funny! I like dumb things ;) I have watched the entire collection of South Park, Family Guy, The Simpsons, American Dad, and Rick And Morty. And I have watched many episodes many times. I even know some of them almost by heart.

So let’s see if we can learn something from these dumb episodes. The lessons learned can be about investing, personal finance or anything money-related. The first post will be about South Park. For this, I chose five episodes who can teach us something about money. If this post ends up being popular, I am going to try to make several of these posts. I already have several ideas for the next episodes.

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All information provided on this site is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional financial advice. You should talk to a professional financial planner if you need help with your finance. We may receive a referral fee if you sign up through the referral links on The Poor Swiss.